PERL

LARRY WALL CREATOR OF PERL 1987

ABOUT THE CREATOR : Education He earned his bachelor’s degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. He then went on to Graduate School at UC Berkley to study linguistics. He intended to use his knowledge in linguistics to create a new writing system for an unwritten language. He wanted to use this new writing system to translate text like the Bible.

INSTEAD…. His plans for finding an unwritten language were cancelled due to health reasons. He instead stayed in the United States and was drawn to computer science. After completing Graduate School he went on to join the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1987 he created Perl, which he compares to a natural language. He is known for using his background in linguistics in his books, interviews, lectures and even his creation of Perl.

“WE ALL AGREE ON THE NECESSITY OF COMPROMISE “WE ALL AGREE ON THE NECESSITY OF COMPROMISE. WE JUST CAN’T AGREE ON WHEN IT’S NECESSARY TO COMPROMISE! ” ~LARRY WALL

INTERESTING INFO. Some terminology of Perl has been influenced by Larry Wall’s Christian faith. Perl was originally named Pearl, after the Parable of the Pearl in Matthew 13:46, which refers to a ‘Pearl of great price’. Since Pearl was already taken, he changed the spelling. Other words that are used in Perl that have religious connotations are bless, apocalypse, and exegesis. Bless : Is a function name, which turns a reference into an instance of an object. - Apocalypse and Exegesis : Both are categories in the organization of Perl design documents.

CURRENTLY Larry Wall continues to oversee further development of Perl. He still largely manages the Perl language development. Randal Schwartz worked closely with Larry Wall on many projects, including Programming Perl.

PERL Perl is an interpreted programming language, the newest version is Perl 6. Perl takes the best features such as the brace-delimited block style from C, and AWK. As well as borrowing features from sed, shell scripting (sh), and BASIC, among others. Perl can be used for network programming, system administration, web development, and GUI development.

Perl Development Perl was originally developed and released on December 18th, 1987. Perl 2.0 was released in 1988. -Featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3.0 was released in 1989. -Support for binary data streams. Perl 4.0 was released in 1991. -Went through a series on maintenance releases, however Wall abandoned Perl 4.0 to work on Perl 5.0.

Perl Development Continued Perl 5.0 was released in 1994. -Nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter; including implementations of objects, references, lexical, and modules. Perl 6.0 -Has not been released yet.

Practical Extraction and Report Language Practical Extraction and Report Language was an acronym given to the name Perl after the name was established, however it has been adopted and used. The language is intended to be practical and efficient rather than beautiful. Perl takes lists from Lisp, hashes from AWK, and regular expression from sed. Perl is widely used in finance and bioinformatics, because of its rapid application development and its ability to handle large data sets.

Supported Operating Systems Unix Systems Mac -Windows -VMS … and many more Perl is the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.

LANGUAGE STRUCTURE Example of code : print “Hello, world!\n” Output: Hello, world! Version 5.10 of Perl introduces a say function that automatically puts a new line character to its output, making the code shorter. Example of code: say ‘Hello, world!’ Output: Hello, world!

DATA TYPES ~A Scalar is a single value (number, string or reference) ~An Array is an ordered collection of scalars ~ A Hash is a map from strings to scalars ~A File Handle is a map to a file, device or pipe which is open for reading, writing or both ~A Subroutine is a piece of code that may be passed arguments, the executed and returned data

Perl’s Attributes to Success The success of Perl can be attributed to a number of things: ~A large base of support both online and in text ~The efficiency appeals to programmers looking to get something done fast ~Companies who may be looking to manage servers and other systems ~Larry Wall helped to keep Perl up to date with the times ~Dynamic usability allowed Perl to find many uses within a wider audience

Works Cited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_CGI http://www.perl.com/ http://perldoc.perl.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall http://www.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/perl-man http://perl.oreilly.com/ http://learn.perl.org/